How do you create and deploy your first survey?

Design the questionnaire in the Portal, set who may see and collect it, then deploy it to the enumerators who will use the app. Deployment is a separate step from design on purpose: it controls who collects data and who can see what comes back.

Video: Quickstart: Creating and deploying your first Survey in mWater on YouTube

Why this matters

The design and deployment split confuses newcomers, and it is the most useful thing to understand early. Design is the questionnaire; deployment is the instance of that questionnaire given to a particular team, with its own permissions and its own data. One survey can be deployed many times, which is how the same national form gets run by different districts without their data mixing.

How to do it

  1. Create the survey and add your questions, choosing question types that match the answers you need.
  2. Add conditions and validation where the answers depend on each other or need checking.
  3. Preview the survey and walk through it as an enumerator would, on a small screen.
  4. Set permissions on the Settings tab for who may edit the design itself.
  5. Create a deployment on the Deploy tab and add the enumerators, approvers and viewers for it.
  6. Have enumerators sync the app, collect a real response, and check that it arrives as expected.

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